Mel Masuda
It's apropos that I write this "Roots" saga at the time of the Year 2020's 399th anniversary of the First Thanksgiving in New England: As my "Roots" notes that follow will show, my 'Ohana
(cf. the "Lilo & Stitch" animated feature: the Native Hawaiian word for, Family) and I have been blessed with the opportunity given to us by the U.S.A. For that, we give thanks to God, or
whichever deity, if any, you may worship. After all: How does moi -- the son of an eighth-grade educated immigrant and his eighth-grade educated spouse -- wind up earning degrees from
Princeton, Yale Law School, and Harvard? Here's the "Roots' story --
My Dad, Tatsuo Masuda, made it on to U.S. soil, into the U.S. Territory of Hawaii, from Japan in 1919 -- a scant five years before the immigration gate slammed shut in 1924 with the effective date of the U.S. Japanese-And-All-Other-Asians Exclusion Act. (The U.S. Chinese Exclusion Act had been passed and went into effect earlier, in 1882. Both Acts were finally repealed in 1953, just before now-Vice-President-Elect Kamala Harris's mother, from southern India, was thus able to emigrate at age 19 to the U.S.A. in the late 1950s. Just think -- If the Acts had not been repealed....)
So, why did my Dad -- born on November 3, 1906, in Fukushima Prefecture, two hours north by train from Tokyo on the Pacific Ocean side -- have to leave his
country of origin? The story goes back two prior generations: His family -- the Amano Clan -- who were samurai retainers to the Tokugawa Shogunate -- chose the wrong side in the struggle between the Shogunate (which had made the
Emperor a figurehead and ruled Japan for 250 years) for control of the country. Mutsuhito, the Meiji Emperor, decided to challenge the Shogunate -- and, if you saw the movie, "The Last Samurai," you know that the Meiji Emperor won. He promptly decommissioned -- fired -- the samurai retainers of the Shogunate, stripping them also of their fiefdoms, including Fukushima Prefecture. It became a cruel irony that Fukushima, in English, translates as "happy island."
The Amano-Masuda Clan was not happy at all after their having been fired -- they went bankrupt. So, when recruiters from the Territory of Hawaii came a-calling in my Dad's hometown of Namie and offering work contracts on Maui Island, my Dad's parents signed up. They couldn't afford his passage to Maui, and so they left him back in Namie in the care of an uncle-- for 10 years. Tatsuo was age 3 when they left for Maui.
When, in the 1970s, I made my one-and-only trip with my Dad and Mom to my Dad's hometown, one of his cousins told me (through a translator, of course, because I don't speak Japanese): "Your Dad was so kawaisoe [sad] to watch: Every morning, he would get up and go to the beach, look toward Hawaii, and ask, 'When are my parents coming back?'" They never did. My Dad went through
eighth grade in Namie when they finally sent for him.
He and his grand-dad (my great-grand-dad), a Shinto priest, literally came fresh off the boat to Hawaii: In 1919, they took the two-hour train ride from Namie down to Tokyo's port suburb of Yokohama, boarded a ship for a six-day voyage, arrived at the Immigration Station in Honolulu, and then took another ship to Lahaina, Maui -- where they were finally reunited with my Dad's parents.
Tatsuo had been promised an education in Hawaii, but all he got -- because the child labor laws were not enforced in the Territory of Hawaii -- was an education
in the school of hard knocks. He was sent immediately to work in the fields, digging, planting, and harvesting sugar cane. One morning, five years later, one of his work gang didn't show up. So, my Dad asked, "What happened to Kenichi?" The answer: "Oh, he lucked out -- he got a job indoors, working as a dining room
waiter at the plantation hotel."
My Dad went straight to his friend and asked him: “When the next job opens up for another waiter, please 'shimpai' [ask for] that job for me!" And, luckily for my Dad, he got that next job opening -- and that started him on his life-long career as a dining room waiter.
When my Dad was 28, following traditional Japanese custom, his parents consulted with another couple and arrived at an agreement for an "omi-aye" -- an arranged marriage -- in which the two families agree that their respective offspring should be wed -- with the offspring having no say in the matter.
My Mom, Setsuyo Ono, was the eldest daughter (of seven children -- two sons and five daughters) of an immigrant couple, also with Fukushima Prefecture roots. She was born on
August 25, 1916, in McGerrow sugar plantation village in central Maui and went through the eighth grade at Puunene School. Then she was apprenticed out as a seamstress. When she
was told by her parents that she had been "omi-aye"-ed -- promised -- to Tatsuo, according to my aunties, she threw a fit. My Mom had been known as the sugar plantation village
"bijin," beauty, and she said: "He's too old for me -- and he's shorter than me!" But, of course, back in those tradition-bound days, she had to acquiesce. (And it's nice to note that my
Mom and Dad actually did fall in love, for life, after the "omi-aye.")
I was born on New Year's Day, 1943, in a small temporary clinic in the sugar cane fields next to the irrigation ditch on Hansen Avenue in Puunene, Maui. I was the first baby born in the
Territory of Hawaii that year, but got no first-baby prizes because -- as you know very well -- World War II for the U.S.A. had started the day after December 7, 1941, when Imperial Japan
had bombed Pearl Harbor and all other U.S. bases on Oahu.
Why was it that my parents; my older brother, Richard; and I (among 250,000 persons of Japanese ancestry in the Territory) were not imprisoned in an internment camp at that time -- as
were 120,000 people whose only "crime" was to be of Japanese ancestry on the U.S. West Coast (including actor George Takei, future U.S. Commerce and Transportation Secretary
Norman Mineta, and the parents of future Olympic ice-skating champion (and winner of "Dancing with the Stars") Kristi Yamaguchi)?
There were four major reasons --
(1) In the 1930s, when the clouds of war began gathering, the American Japanese community on Oahu went directly to the U.S. Commanding General in the Territory and, with his approval,
formed a Liaison Committee of Communications that reported back to him about any alleged espionage or pro-Imperial Japan activities. (In case you weren't aware, if one is born in a
capital "T" "Territory" of the U.S.A., Congress has designated that "Territory" to be a future State and anyone born in such a "Territory" is a U.S. citizen.) So, the U.S. military in Hawaii
was aware that most Japanese Americans in Hawaii and even Japanese nationals like my Dad were loyal to the U.S.A. and not Japan. By contrast, on the U.S. West Coast, the Japanese
nationals and Japanese Americans were scattered over a wide area, including Japan Town ghettos and rural farms-- and there was no Liaison Committee of Communications with the U.S.
military -- leading to the issuance by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in February 1942 of Executive Order 9066 requiring all persons of Japanese ancestry -- U.S. citizens and nationals,
alike--to pack one suitcase each, sell all their assets, including real property, and report to "relocation centers" from which they were transported to "internment camps."
(2) The logistics of removing 250,000 Japanese Americans and Japanese nationals -- 1/2 of the then-total population of the Territory of Hawaii -- into internment camps in the Islands of
Hawaii posed a logistical nightmare. Would one round up all 250,000 and place them on one island, such as Molokai? Or would one even round all of them up and ship them off to the
internment camps in the interior of California, Arizona, Idaho, Wyoming (where Secretary Mineta was interned), and Arkansas? Another logistical nightmare!
(3) At the time that the enemy bombs fell on Pearl Harbor and all other Oahu military bases, King Sugar and Queen Pineapple were the two major industries and
employers in the Territory. Internment would have devastated those industries. At that time, an economic oligarchy -- all-male, descendants of the New England
missionaries who came to Hawaii in 1820 -- controlled the Hawaii economy through five corporations, nicknamed "The Big Five." These captains of industry got word to
FDR (a) that the Hawaii Japanese were loyal to the U.S.A. (leading, in 1943, to the segregated nisei troops sent to Europe to fight in Italy and France) and (b) that
the Hawaii economy could not stand the shock of having the bulk of its labor force interned.
(4) Ironically, in the drive to repair the ships damaged in the Pearl Harbor attack ASAP, among the best divers to do the underwater repair work were divers of Japanese ancestry.
A sad footnote: On the day after the Imperial Japan attack on Oahu Island, the FBI and the military rounded up 1,200 individuals of Japanese ancestry whom they viewed as security risks, such as Buddhist priests and Japanese-language teachers.
They were whisked away -- and -- as one of my friends whose Dad was among those rounded up notes -- for an entire year these 1,200 were not heard from. My friend's Mom, who had been a fulltime homemaker, had to go to work as a domestic cleaning other people's houses, to make ends meet. After a year, they got a letter from their Dad saying that, after being held at a remote internment
camp at Honouliuli on Oahu, he had been transferred to Gila Bend, Arizona. My friend says that, when his Dad was released from that internment camp in early 1945, he had become an alcoholic -- and he died of that disease prematurely.
******
My younger brother, Roy, was born three years after World War II ended. Then, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the sugar plantation began to suffer from the cheaper labor available to foreign competition. In 1952, the plantation hotel on Maui closed -- and my Dad lost his job. Because he couldn't afford our passage to Oahu, he left us behind on Maui while he came to Honolulu to look for a job. Luckily, Tatsuo was able to get a job as a dining room waiter at Waikiki's Halekulani Hotel (the old-style one of bungalows and cabanas -- not the Richie Rich skyscraper financed by Japan interests that bought the property in the 1980s).
My Dad sent for us the next year. We stayed with my cousins when we "country hicks" first arrived in the Big City of Honolulu -- that was the first time I had ever
seen television, and my cousins will never, ever let me forget that because "you threw up!" My Mom got a job as a "pineapple trimmer" (donning protective gear, she sliced off the poke-y tops of pineapples as they tumbled down the canning assembly line) at Dole Cannery (which has since moved to the Philippines).
We three sons were latchkey kids -- My Mom would leave at 5:00 AM in the mornings to catch the bus to the Dole Cannery and then return home about 4 PM
and cook dinner for us. My Dad took the bus home from the hotel at 10 PM at nights and never saw us in the mornings because he slept until 9 AM when he
had to catch the bus back to Waikiki to the Halekulani.
The last of Hawaii's public school system segregated according to speech -- When the soldiers and sailors began being sent to Hawaii around 1920 to build up U.S. defenses, many of them then moved their families over here. They and their spouses were appalled when their children, attending the Hawaii public schools, came home speaking pidgin English -- in which Island patois, among other things, the soft English "th" sound as in "the" comes out as the hard pidgin "d" as in "dah."
So, the military convinced the Territorial government to set up a separate track of schools within the public school system called the "English standard" system.
A small example of how one would get into this "English standard system" is: If one were shown a picture of a cat and asked, "What is this?," if you answered in correct English, "That's a cat," you passed the entrance test, but if you said, "Dat one cat" in perfect pidgin, you flunked. Being a "goody two-shoes," I passed the test and attended the set of public schools that embodied legal segregation based on speech!
Not surprisingly, given the inherent discriminatory nature of this two-track public school system, after World War II, the Hawaii legislature voted to phase out the system -- and I was in the last "English standard" graduating class of 525 at Theodore Roosevelt High School in 1960 in Honolulu.
From there, I was fortunate to be able to achieve my ice-hockey-style hat trick of higher education -- Princeton, Yale, and Harvard -- through scholarships, loans, and work-study (busboy in the Princeton dining halls, freshman-dorm counselor at Yale).
But it wasn't easy -- I suffered terrible culture shock in my first two years at Princeton (I had never, ever been away from Hawaii before), and I flunked out.
Luckily, Princeton welcomes back its prodigal undergrads if they make up the credits elsewhere during their "year(s) in the wilderness."
I spent my forced "year off" between sophomore and junior year working as a full-time news reporter for the Honolulu Advertiser daily in Honolulu -- and honed my writing skills to the point where I was able, later, to write my way on to the Board of Editors of the Yale law Journal. After enjoying my three years at Yale Law with all of you, I was a White House Fellow on a field trip to Boston, when the Dean of Admissions at Harvard Kennedy School said to me: "Mel, you've done 2/3rds of an ice-hockey hat trick. How'd you like to come to Harvard for your master's in public administration?" An offer I couldn't refuse.
I am what we call here in Hawaii, in the Native Hawaiian language, a "keiki o ka aina" -- a "child of the land." My Dad, Tatsuo, and my Mom, Setsuyo, always
stressed the importance of "Aloha Aina" -- love for our Islands-Of-Hawaii.
So, even when I first went away to Princeton, I knew, in my heart of hearts, that I would return to Hawaii to "settle down." And I have -- For the past two generations,
I have been the proverbial snug-as-a-bug-in-the-rug here. Along with my late "Native Hawaiian bruddah," singer-activist George Helm, I helped found the
Protect Kaho'olawe 'Ohana that, through peaceful disobedience (something I learned about in "Constitutional Law" at Yale Law School), stopped the use of the Island of Kaho'olawe, off Maui, as a bombing target. (Alas, George became a
martyr to the cause, disappearing while on a surfboard from Kaho'olawe to Maui -- through tears, I wrote the album liner notes to his CD, "George Helm: A True Hawaiian" -- available through Cord International Inc. via the Internet.)
I married a Native Hawaiian-Filipino, Karen of the Hoaeae Clan of Kauai, who is now a retired social worker. I myself carved out a 30-year career as a Professor of Law and still teach as
an Adjunct.
My Mom and Dad will, I hope, be pleased that I have passed on the lessons I learned from their examples of "doing your best, no matter what challenges life presents you with" to our
now-grown offspring: Son Maka, age 40 -- a National Merit Scholarship winner -- holds his master's degree in data analysis and is with Amazon in Seattle in its Government Payments
division. His wife, Allison Ayers, an engineer, is with the XBox marketing division of Microsoft. They have two twin fraternal sons, now almost 8 (December 16th): Ikaika and Kapono.
Daughter Kaiewa, age 37, with her master's degree in counseling psychology, has arrived full-circle: She is now a High School Counselor at her alma mater, the Kamehameha Schools
flagship campus in Honolulu, which campus she attended for all 13 grades from K to 12. Her husband, Matthew (Matt) Muranaka, has his master's degree in speech therapy and is a roving
therapist for the State Department of Education in Central Oahu. They have two sons, Kahiau (age 5), who is following in Kaiewa's footsteps as a kindergartner at the Kamehameha
Schools, and Keolaloa (age 3), who is in pre-school.
******
"There but for the grace of God, go I." -- Since the terrible March 11, 2011, Northeast Japan/Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami that devastated portions of Fukushima Prefecture, from whence my Dad, Tatsuo, came right before the U.S. immigration gates closed, I have often thought, "Gee whiz -- What if he had stayed
behind in Japan, and I had come along there?" Very probably, I would have perished in the March 11, 2011, disaster.
I was startled three years ago, when -- keeping ABC Nightly News on for sound,
I heard the voice of then-anchor Diane Sawyer, saying: "And, several years after the Northeast Japan disaster, we have a report about what conditions are like there -- from the town of Namie, Fukushima...." (!) My goodness, I thought instantly -- That's my Dad's hometown! The correspondent came on TV, in protective gear,
and reported: "This town of Namie is directly across the bay from the Dai'ichi Nuclear Power Plant that was flooded and exploded on March 11, 2011, throwing debris into the air for about 20 miles. Today, I'm reporting from Namie, which is
a ghost town because, until contamination levels go down, no one except for us media on guided tours is allowed in."
"There but for the grace of God, go I."
So, at this time of Thanksgiving -- the oldest U.S. holiday that sees its 400th anniversary next year, in 2021-- I give thanks to my Dad, Tatsuo, and my Mom, Setsuyo, for having provided --
through their sacrifices for me -- the foundation to a wonderful life! MM
